A Siren

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

Was it possibly that he was urged irresistibly forwards by the fear that if he did not at once make the prize he so eagerly coveted irrevocably his own, the power to make it so might pass away from him? that, after all, his nephew might have found the goddess as irresistible as he had found her himself; and that she might prefer the younger to the older Marchese di Castelmare?

Whatever the reflections might have been that at last drove him to take the definitive step of applying to his lawyer, we know that they were not of a pleasant kind—that the state of the Marchese's mind was anything but a happy or peaceful one during the hours that preceded his sending the message to Signor Fortini.

The manner in which the lawyer received the communication made to him, and his determination, on further consideration, to make the Marchese Ludovico at once aware of the step contemplated by his uncle, will not have been forgotten. The reader will, it is hoped, remember also how, sallying forth after his early dinner for this purpose, Signor Fortini encountered the Marchese Ludovico in the street; how the latter communicated to the old lawyer the state of anxiety he was in about the Signorina Bianca Lalli, whom he had lost in the Pineta; and finally how the lawyer and the Marchese together had gone to the Porta Nuova, by which the road leading to St. Apollinare and to the Pineta quits the city, in order there to make inquiries,—and the terrible reply to their inquiries that there met him.

What that reply was had not been immediately clear to the lawyer. For, as far as the circumstances of the previous events were then known to him, there were two persons, Bianca Lalli, the singer, and Paolina Foscarelli, the Venetian artist—two young girls missing, who were both known to have been out of the city in that direction that morning; two young girls of whom he knew little more than this, that they had apparently reason to feel a deadly jealousy of each other. Which of these two was the one whose dead body lay there under the city gateway before him, he had no immediate means of knowing. For Ludovico, who had raised the sheet that covered the features of the dead, and had, of course, become on the instant aware of the truth, had fallen into unconsciousness, without uttering a word beyond the one agonized outcry that, for the moment, had left little doubt on the mind of the lawyer that the victim at their feet was the girl Paolina.

But, of course, the means of setting at rest the doubt on the lawyer's mind were very soon at hand; at hand even before Ludovico recovered from his short fainting fit. For the same man among the Octroi officers, who had recognized La Lalli when she had passed with Ludovico in the morning, was now able to say that the woman who now lay dead in the gateway was in truth no other than the poor Diva.

Paolina, in fact, was by that time safe at home, and had been well scolded by Signora Orsola for having given her such a fright by playing the truant for so long.

Of course her old friend called upon her for an account of the hours which had elapsed during her prolonged absence. And Paolina, in reply to this demand, gave a very intelligible account of the time. But unfortunately, most unfortunately, as the sequel showed it to be, this account rested solely on her own statement. Of course old Orsola saw not the smallest reason for doubting any part of it. And the explanations which she gave of her movements, and of the motives which led to them, embodied in the following statement of what happened from the time when she left the church to the time when she re-entered the city, are the result of her subsequent declarations, when called upon to account for her occupation of those hours.

The aged Capucine friar had, as we know, watched her take the path that led to the farmhouse on the border of the wood. And having looked after her as long as she was in his sight, he sighed heavily, and, turning away, went back to his prayers in the church. But had he been able to watch her on her way a few minutes longer, he would, if the girl's own account of her movements were correct, have seen her change the direction of her walk.

About half-way between the eastern end of the church, by which the path the friar had indicated to Paolina passed, and the farmhouse on the border of the forest, another path, skirting what had once apparently been the cemetery attached to the church, turned off at right angles to the left, so as, after some distance, to rejoin the road on its way towards the city. And this path, according to her own account, Paolina took; thus abandoning her intention of reaching the forest at the spot where the farmhouse stood. Why had she thus changed her purpose?

Various thoughts and feelings, which had presented themselves to her in the space of the minute or two she had occupied in walking round to the eastern end of the church, had contributed to produce this change in her purpose.